Simply wonderful stuff bubbling up from other bloggers and writers over the last couple of days - rich, creamy bloggy goodness that I simply have to share … that is, if you have not already found it yourself.

The pretensions of our new aristocratic class, dissected for your pleasure, here… Read full post »

Being that a picture is worth a thousand words, herewith a good few thousand of them, from a visit to the San Antonio Botanical Garden... from the formal rose garden .... 

...to the arbors and fountains ....

There are critters ... some large… Read full post »

I have a platter full of work right in front of me, now and the good part is that three-quarters of it is paid work. The remaining quarter is split between providing good a few spoonfuls of good bloggy ice cream, and trying to finish the next book.  Now, I have… Read full post »

 Yard sale on steroids, under the blazing sun...

 The Daughter Unit is currently a college student, busily engaged in picking up credits towards a degree in research biology, and therefore is on a strict budget as far as recreational shopping goes. Still, she enjoys the… Read full post »

 

 (Funky interior wall in the Forest Magic House)

In the Botanical Garden that is – the San Antonio Botanical Garden, hidden away in a quiet old residential neighborhood north of downtown. For all of summer there are a series of artist-designed playhouses or forts or w… Read full post »

All right then - who's up for contemplating some excellent down-home eats from Texas -- the home of the food of the gods, the Breakfast Taco!

And brisket and BBQ, and the finest local grocery chain on earth - HEB!

 

Crabcake and fruit-cup at High's Cafe, Comfort

 … Read full post »

(Another chapter in the on-going work - this being a terribly dramatic one, since everyone in the story is waiting for word of what has happened at the Alamo, in the spring of 1836. I am still trying to think of a better title  than the working one of "Gone to… Read full post »

(A repost from last summer, which got no comments and no ratings. Eh, aren't we supposed to recycle?)

 Summer heat is at its' worst in July and August - even well into September -   in Texas now as it was in Southern California when I was growing… Read full post »

 

 

Three trees, three colors...

The chief one upon my mind of course, is why this has turned out to be such a banner year for crepe myrtles – honestly, for the past month, it seems as if every crepe myrtle tree has been covered in blooms to… Read full post »

 

The basic ingredients - bread, tomatoes, garlic, salt, olive oil, vinegar and pepper, with supervisor

This is one of my favorite recipes when I have an abundance of two things – super-ripe and juicy tomatoes, and slightly stale artisan-bakery bread. The local grocery chain makes… Read full post »

For the 4th of July weekend, being that a picture is worth a thousand words, herewith a good few thousand of them, from my photo archives...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable… Read full post »

 

 

 There's something weird
in the neighborhood,
who're you gonna call?

There's something strange
and it don't look good,
who're you gonna call?

 

Rin-Tin-Tin! Is that really you?

 Being that this is the real and completely material and logical world - proba… Read full post »

So, as more or less expected General McChrystal resigned; a terribly drastic way to get an instant face to face attitude adjustment session with the boss, I must say. I skimmed the original Rolling Stone story, and I have to also observe that I am still mystified as to how and… Read full post »

To: Various
Re: Current Situation in the Gulf of Mexico
From: Sgt Mom

1. To our various house-broken major-media news-hounds: So, here we have a situation, producing an oil leak from a busted oil well in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico,  of such a copious quantities that it has been described as…

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 (Another chapter of the WIP, tentatively known as Gone to Texas ... I am casting around for another title for it, since there already are several fiction and non-fiction books with this title, so suggestions are welcome. This chapter is set in the winter and early spring of 1835-36. Links to… Read full post »

 (All serene and quiet - the performance wasn't happening there...)

 Perhaps it might come as a surprise to the bi-coastal cultural types to find out there is more to San Antonio than the Alamo and a greater variety of available forms of amusements on a weekend evening than high… Read full post »

The balding gentleman in the center is my great-great grandfather, Wayne Smedley, of Lionville, Chester County PA, sometime around 1910, with his wife and three children - My Granny Jessie (left) , her brother Gilbert (standing center) and her sister Bertha (right.) I really don't know much… Read full post »

 

One of the challenges of writing about a frontier-era woman of fairly conventional background and 19^th century limitations, and trying to keep it all exciting for a reader comes when you have to start tackling things like  war, politics, commerce, Indian raids, and frontier exp/…

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There are days, as the late Molly Ivins once observed, when “ . . .  you open the paper and it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator, smoking a cigar. Hard to know what to think . . .”

 

So when I read in passing,… Read full post »

Nononono  . . .  not the kinda-sorta-conservative political part of that entity formerly known as Great Britain, and usually prefaced with the adjectives ‘hidebound’ and ‘reactionary’ . . .  but those citizens of the 13 British colonies distributed along the eas… Read full post »

I suppose a lot of midnight oil is being burned, in various European and American newspaper editorial offices, at the UN and other various transnational entities, the various offices of CAIR, and departments of Middle East Studies at universities everywhere, as the denizens thereof are trying to figu… Read full post »

 

(This is an account of the 'Come and Take It" fight, from the perspective of a woman living in 1835 Gonzales, just when general unhappiness between the Federalists and the Centralists began to boil over. I am hoping to have this WIP completed this year and released in the spring… Read full post »

 

This last weekend was the annual Spring Jubilee in Converse, Texas - which is one of those semi-independent towns on the north-east edge of San Antonio, right next to Randolph AFB. The Spring Jubilee was to benefit the local American Legion post - which, it may be fair… Read full post »

In January, 2007 I had just launched into the first book about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country – a project which almost immediately came close to overflowing the constraint that I had originally visualized, of about twenty chapters of about 6,500 words each. Of course… Read full post »